What the heck is a Higgs Boson?

It's not every day theoretical physics becomes a news sensation.
Indeed, it's downright odd to hear "The God Particle" being discussed by people in supermarket queues, or exchanging pleasantries on the treadmill at the gym.

It’s not every day theoretical physics becomes a news sensation.

Indeed, it’s downright odd to hear “The God Particle” being discussed by people in supermarket queues, or exchanging pleasantries on the treadmill at the gym.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” “Yes, and how about those guys at CERN discovering Higgs Boson? Amazing!”

Everyone, it seems, has become a bit of a particle physicist overnight. Or have they?

“What exactly is Higgs Bottom?” my younger sister asked me yesterday, causing me first to laugh and then to think. I mean, yes, what exactly is it? Because as geeky as I may be, I still had a tough time explaining it to her without furtively pulling up Wikipedia on my phone and hoping she wouldn’t notice.

The first thing that’s striking about Higgs Boson is that we’ve been looking for it for a rather long time. 48 years in fact. So it’s an elusive little sucker.

Another cool fact for nerds is that it’s also linked to a kind of force field (the Higgs field) and is thought to explain how matter actually attains its mass.

Because, you see, most mass in the universe (about 96 percent of it) is actually made up of sinister sounding “dark matter” while only four percent of the universe has mass we can actually explain. “Dark matter,” “Dark energy”, it all sounds more Harry Potter than Higgs Boson.

But for the wizards at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, finding evidence of Higgs Boson is almost the equivalent of winning the 10 million dollar jackpot at a casino – almost impossible, and leaving you with the sense that things may not be all they initially seem.

And then of course there’s the way in which we’ve forced Higgs Boson out of hiding, using the incredibly awesome sounding Large Hadron Collider, equal parts cool and terrifying because it may or may not end up ripping open a black hole in the fabric of our existence, though my physicist friends assure me this is “quite unlikely.” Then again, so was the possibility of finding Higgs Boson.

Two separate groups of physicists are said to have found evidence of the elusive particle with less than a one in 3.5 million chance they got it wrong and were actually seeing something else. Now, I may not be much of a gambler, but I like those odds.

That aside, though, and we still don’t REALLY know what it is, do we?

Except that I’ve discovered this really cute video, with fantastic animation, which helps me to at least scratch the surface of understanding. You’ll like it, take a look:

Moving to the very large, gravity should be slowing the expansion of the universe, yet we observe that it is not. Something is pushing the galaxies apart. Dark energy is the term originally given to whatever force that is. One possibility is that where ordinary matter attracts other ordinary matter (gravity), ordinary matter repels dark matter (antigravity). Or perhaps the dark matter increases the mass of the universe, and so the total energy of the big bang, to the point where it simply hasn't had time to stop expanding yet. Who knows?

This is one of the most short-sighted comments I've ever seen - and they abound on the internet. Your statements belie you assertion that you are a scientist. The computer and network that allowed you to post your comments were made possible by the work of physicists whose work was purely theoretical when it was new; but it was elaborated on and tinkered with and then applied by engineers to make the electronic world we live in.

You know I thought the neutron was simply a proton and electron fused together. From a mass and charge point of view that is true.
Yet the video didn't draw the neutron that way, instead using a combination of those u and d things.
The problem with this video is that it doesn't really tell me what the Higgs boson is. If it is a particle that gives other particles mass, that means every particle that has mass must be made up of Higgs bosons. But how?

The Higgs boson represents the culmination of the physicists' biggest welfare project to date. It keeps them employed and they can but billions of dollars worth of equipment and instruments, which makes the suppliers happy. As far as I can tell, neither the Higgs boson nor knowledge about how the universe started with the Big Bang have any importance to daily life. So it's discovery is a non event with no significance except to the Nobel Prize committee; and what do they know? Years ago the Nobel prize in medicine went to the doctor who devised the frontal lobotomy. And more recently the Nobel Peace prize went to Yasser Arafat. Take it from a scientist, the Higgs boson means nothing.

Correct, although how well supported and how widely supported differ from one theory to another. I would also add that any scientific theory must be falsifiable. Until someone can prove it is false, a scientific theory remains valid (as it is supported by observation and experiment)

I am always shocked when I hear the word "just" lumped with "theory". And on a technical website yet! A theory in the science and technical world is a set of well tested, and widely accepted explanations for known facts.

Perhaps too, I don't think there is much that is more important to the human race than discovery. It is "eating the apple" that makes us unique, after all. As far as I'm concerned, there are not many more worthy causes to sink some money into.